Equitable retirement income tontines: Mixing cohorts without discriminating

M. A. Milevsky; T. S. Salisbury

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1610.09384

Equitable retirement income tontines: Mixing cohorts without discriminating

M. A. Milevsky·T. S. Salisbury

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

There is growing interest in the design of pension annuities that insure against idiosyncratic longevity risk while pooling and sharing systematic risk. This is partially motivated by the desire to reduce capital and reserve requirements while retaining the value of mortality credits; see for example Piggott, Valdez and Detzel (2005) or Donnelly, Guillen and Nielsen (2014). In this paper we generalize the natural retirement income tontine introduced by Milevsky and Salisbury (2015) by combining heterogeneous cohorts into one pool. We engineer this scheme by allocating tontine shares at either a premium or a discount to par based on both the age of the investor and the amount they invest. For example, a 55 year-old allocating $\$10,000$ to the tontine might be told to pay $\$$200 per share and receive 50 shares, while a 75 year-old allocating $\$8,000$ might pay $\$$40 per share and receive 200 shares. They would all be mixed together into the same tontine pool and each tontine share would have equal income rights. The current paper addresses existence and uniqueness issues and discusses the conditions under which this scheme can be constructed equitably -- which is distinct from fairly -- even though it isn't optimal for any cohort. As such, this also gives us the opportunity to compare and contrast various pooling schemes that have been proposed in the literature and to differentiate between arrangements that are socially equitable, vs. actuarially fair vs. economically optimal.

Explore related subjects

q-fin.MF q-fin.GN

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

M. A. Milevsky, T. S. Salisbury. 2016-10-28. Equitable retirement income tontines: Mixing cohorts without discriminating. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.09384

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Variance-Optimal Hedging in the Rough Hawkes--Heston Model

We study variance-optimal stock hedging and the convergence of approximate strategies in the rough Hawkes--Heston model. Starting from the model's affine conditional transform and the affine Volterra jump framework, we obtain semi-explicit hedges for European calls and a representation of the minimum quadratic error through the Galtchouk--Kunita--Watanabe projection. Our main approximation result keeps the original stock, variance driver, and information flow fixed while regularizing the kernel used to evaluate the hedge. To handle singular memory and common marked jumps, we construct the approximate holdings from histories available before trading and preserve the conditional transform's random modulus envelope. Riccati--Volterra stability and weighted truncation then yield convergence in the original stock's trading norm on compact Fourier intervals. For calls, a joint choice of kernel regularization and Fourier cutoff gives convergence of the initial capitals and strategies, uniform-in-time square-mean convergence of continuous-time gains, and convergence of the terminal mean-square error to the variance-optimal value. A numerical experiment with shifted fractional kernels illustrates the construction on common original-market paths.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2026

Numeraire Invariance of Entropy-Projected Martingale Measures

Let $P$ be a fixed physical law and let $Q$ be an equivalent martingale measure selected from the martingale-measure set associated with a chosen numeraire. A change of numeraire maps $Q$ to $T_LQ$, where $d(T_LQ)=L\,dQ$ and $L$ is the terminal likelihood ratio. The forward relative-entropy projection minimizing $D_{\mathrm{KL}}(P\Vert Q)$ commutes with this transform because its objective changes only by the constant $-E_P\log L$. The minimal entropy martingale measure (MEMM) orientation $D_{\mathrm{KL}}(Q\Vert P)$ does not have this property, and a trinomial counterexample shows that independently recomputed MEMMs need not be likelihood compatible. We make two economic consequences explicit. First, the two entropy orientations are precisely the $Q$-dependent terms in the classical convex-dual objectives for logarithmic and exponential utility, respectively. Second, likelihood compatibility is equivalent to equality of the pricing functionals obtained in the two numeraires. Hence the forward selectors value every integrable claim consistently across numeraires, whereas the two MEMMs in the counterexample assign different prices to a nonreplicable digital claim. We also prove a finite-state class-level characterization: uniform invariance over the elementary one-period likelihood-ratio families forces a smooth convex $f$-divergence to be logarithmic, up to scaling and affine equivalence. Finally, in finite-state markets, the forward projection exists under the usual strictly positive feasible-point condition; its density $dP/dQ^*$ is attainable log-optimal terminal wealth, and the minimum forward entropy equals maximal expected log growth.

q-fin.MF↗

arXiv2026

The Delta of a Variance Swap

We define the variance swap delta as the sensitivity of the price of variance to a change in underlying price. We use Carr-Madan spanning formulas to analyze this sensitivity when the implied volatility smile curve may depend on the underlying price. We show that the variance swap total delta is zero for the class of smile curves that are pure functions of (log) moneyness, which goes against the empirical observation that variance is up when the market is down. We propose a simple modification of the smile to correct this issue.

q-fin.MF↗